Chinese Premier Li Keqiang presents the government’s “work report” during the second session of the 13th National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, March 5, 2019 (Imaginechina photo via AP Images).

How China’s Rise Has Remade Global Politics

The EditorsWednesday, May 8, 2019

As much as any other single development, China’s rise over the past two decades has remade the landscape of global politics. Beginning with its entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, China rapidly transformed its economy from a low-cost “factory to the world” to a global leader in advanced technologies. Along the way, it has transformed global supply chains, but also international diplomacy, leveraging its success to become the primary trading and development partner for emerging economies across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

But Beijing’s emergence as a global power has also created tensions. Early expectations that China’s integration into the global economy would lead to liberalization at home and moderation abroad have proven overly optimistic, especially since President Xi Jinping rose to power in 2012. Instead, Xi has overseen a domestic crackdown on dissent, in order to shore up and expand the Chinese Communist Party’s control over every aspect of Chinese society. Needed economic reforms have been put on the backburner, while unfair trade practices, such as forced technology transfers and other restrictions for foreign corporations operating in China, have resulted in a trade war with the U.S. and increasing criticism from Europe.

Meanwhile, China’s “quiet rise” has given way to more vocal expressions of great power aspirations and a more assertive international posture, particularly with regard to China’s territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Combined with Beijing’s military modernization program, that has put Asia, but also the United States, on notice that China's economic power will have geopolitical implications.

WPR has covered China’s rise in detail, and continues to examine key questions about what will happen next. Can China sustain its economic miracle in the face of demographic and environmental challenges? Will China’s military modernization program change the balance of power in Asia and beyond? Is China seeking to reshape the rules-based international system to better reflect its interests, or is Beijing’s goal to undermine and replace it? Below are some of the highlights of WPR’s coverage.

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According to Chinese government projections, within the next decade China may surpass the United States as the world’s leading nuclear energy producer. Despite that growth, though, China is increasingly viewed less as the salvation of an ailing Western nuclear power industry, and more as a competitive threat.

Aspects of China’s “social credit” system, which U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has derided as “Orwellian,” have prompted valid concerns about the potential for misuse of personal information. Yet the system has pragmatic objectives that many Chinese people support, scholar Genia Kostka told WPR in an email interview for China Note, our weekly newsletter top news and expert analysis on China.

China Under Xi Jinping

Many observers in the West assumed that integrating China into the global economy would lead to domestic liberalization and international moderation. Instead, under Xi, China has pocketed the gains of its economic rise, while cracking down on what little domestic dissent had emerged under previous leaders.

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China’s Military Modernization

Once primarily a personnel-heavy and ill-equipped land army, the Chinese military has overhauled itself into a force capable of fighting on land and sea, in the air and space, as well as in the cyber domain. And its cutting-edge equipment is increasingly supplied by a Chinese defense industry that has itself become a global player.

U.S.-China Relations

As optimism about China’s rise began to fade at the end of the Obama administration, the U.S. foreign policy community quickly embraced a bipartisan consensus on the need to get tough on Beijing. But President Donald Trump’s trade war and calls for a new Cold War might end up being counterproductive.

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